Cargo Cult - Who is John Frum? He is known to us by many names, this Visitor from Elsewhere, dispenser of endless abundance and wielder of mysterious technologies: John Frum, Quetzalcoatl, Osiris, "Bob." His cargo is splendid, his generosity boundless, his motives beyond our understanding. But across the ages and around the world, the stories all agree: one day he will return, bearing great gifts. Our theme this year asks three related questions; who is John Frum, where is he really from, and where, on spaceship Earth, are we all going?

One speculation, first suggested in 1883, is that the occurrence of the Peshtigo and Chicago fires on the same day was not just a coincidence, but that all the major fires that occurred in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin on that day were caused by the impact of fragments from Comet Biela. This theory was revived in a 1985 book[12] and investigated in a 2004 paper to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.[13] Scientists with expertise in the area dispute that meteorites can ignite a fire; meteorites are cold to the touch when they reach the Earth's surface, and there are no credible reports of any fire anywhere having been started by a meteorite.[14][15] Additionally, various aspects of the behaviors of the Chicago and Peshtigo fires attributed to extraterrestrial intervention have more mundane explanations.[16] In any event, no external source of ignition was needed; numerous small fires were already burning in the area after a tinder-dry summer,[6][17] generating so much smoke that the Green Island Light was kept lit 24 hours a day for weeks before the main fire.[18] All that was needed to generate the firestorm, as well as other fires in the Midwest, were the winds from the front that moved in that evening.[17]